I’ve had my Mac Mini for many months now. Already it’s become my entertainment center. It has all my music and movies and serves as a backup for my laptop. This has allowed me to free up my laptop for real work stuff. The one thing that wasn’t working for me was photos. I tried iPhoto a few times and it was just blazingly slow. Like I could click on a photo and go get a cup of coffee and come back and the photo would be displayed. I was kind of bummed out about that. I don’t really want to carry around every picture I’ve ever taken on my laptop. I back them up and everything, but I really wanted to move everything over to the Mac if possible.
Well a couple weeks ago I picked up a LaCie external 160 GB Hard Drive. It’s the one custom made for the Mini. Looks like this:
Turns out that will all my stuff on the mini, I had less than 10 GB free on the existing HD. It would often go less if I was doing some DVD stuff. So I installed the LaCie and move just about every piece of content – music, photos, backups, videos, over to the external disk. The main disk now has about 55 GB free.
So I figured I’d fire up iPhoto again and see what happened. Not bad. It was actually just about as zippy as PhotoElements on the PC. Not quite as many features, but fine for cataloging. If I need to do any real editing, I can bring it over to the PC and PhotoShop.
Then I heard that iPhoto 6 had some good speed enhancements. So I just installed that. Very nice. I love the full screen editing. I wish Apple would put IPTC metadata into iPhoto, but I found some applescripts that will allow me to copy over my IPTC tags to iPhoto keywords. I’ll report how that goes.
And my next big purchase may be a 1 Gig memory chip. I’ve already done the unspeakable and cracked open the mini a while back to install a 512 MB chip I had sitting around.
iPhoto 6 is indeed MUCH faster than its predecessors for sure. I don’t have many (maybe under 2,000) photos, but I can scroll with ease through them. The center badge showing dates is a nice touch in the UI.
I have a 200G Lacie FW drive serving up my music, photos, movies and its been wonderful.
Glad you’re running quicker. If you select more than 1 photo to edit, you can edit one next to another – but you can’t do batch editing as far as I know (yet). iLife ’06 is SO worth the money. It’s cheap 🙂
I got a mini about a month ago for testing purposes and I’ve really enjoyed using it. I’ve found myself using it more and more for general surfing as well as ruby/open source dev work (imo, developers are seriously penalized for trying to do open source dev work on Windows). The one thing that I really disliked about the mini was the 13 gigs of crap that were installed when it arrived. That is the nice thing about building a pc in that you can easily get away from all the preinstalled stuff. That Lacie drive looks nice. I might see if I can grab one.
Yeah, the mini and the lacie is a great combo. Between my Blockbuster all-you-can-rent for $20 a month, and Handbrake, I’m building up a nice library of movies. That I can watch over my wireless network on my laptop from any room in the house. Can do the same with my iTunes library.
A 1GB module will benefit you greatly. I too have the 160GB LaCie drive that fits under the mac mini and use it for all my music and photos. iPhoto 6 runs very well for me on a 1.42 GHz mini w/ 1GB RAM.
I might add that I also have a 100GB drive inside a Newertech ministack that I use for my boot drive instead of the one inside the mini. That keeps things a little peppier as far as application launch time, etc. is concerned.